Quick Overview

Description

Details

VUE Infinite 2016 is the most efficient and advanced solution for creating, animating and rendering natural 3D environments.

It offers a high-end 3D scenery solution for SFX studios, animators, illustrators, architects, matte painters and CG professionals. It is strongly focused on power, productivity and inter-operability with existing toolkits.

VUE Infinite 2016 naturally integrates and extends all major 3D applications to provide a complete, professional natural 3D studio.

Specifically designed for professionals, it combines a multitude of cutting-edge features that easily integrate with your workflow.

With its intuitive, production-oriented layout, you will quickly enhance your production with rich EcoSystems of wind-swept trees and plants, Spectral atmospheres and detailed terrains in fully animated scenes.

These new releases reflect our commitment to bring new features and functionality to VUE and PlantFactory as frequently as possible. We plan to release incremental updates that introduce new functionality every 4 months.

Key new features in VUE 2016 R2 include:

360 VR Panoramas: VUE 2016 R2 enables the rendering of 360 panoramas as static images or animations, which are compatible with all of VUE's render options, such as multi-pass or high dynamic range (HDR). When rendering a VR panorama, VUE automatically levels the camera perfectly to avoid unwanted distortion. Rendered VR panoramas are automatically recognized by Facebook, YouTube, and other panoramic compliant platforms as 360 images or videos.

Up to 16 Viewports: VUE 2016 R2 enables you to set up to 16 viewports instead of the four traditional views. This feature is particularly useful on a multi-monitor system, to test various framing options or when adding more camera angles without touching any of the main scene setup. All additional viewports retain the same traditional options, such as render in view and the ability to set up as many perspective cameras as users would like.

The 'Interactive slider changes' option now also affects the mouse wheel for more dynamic visual display of users' modifications in real-time.Improved visibility in viewports as a result of revised wireframe selection colors.The user interface is now locked when downloading an object or a scene from the extra content.

Set specific export quality for all assets in your scene independantly or globally

Export textured assets as Collada

Choose to export all texture maps when exporting to Alembic

Import all objects included in an Alembic File, including instantiated objects

VUE will automatically detect and apply a global scale factor when importing scenes or assets coming from other software

Export your meshes' original maps with their UVs

HeightField Terrain Technology - More flexible and a lot more Powerful!With VUE Infinite 2016, we're introducing a brand new terrain modeling technology, more flexible and a lot more powerful, called 'Heightfield Terrains'.

This new technology allows you to add terrain effects that were previously impossible to achieve, such as Hydrological and Thermal Simulations!

Similar to procedural terrains, Heightfield Terrains are based on a function graph, but baked on a fixed-resolution grid. This will give you more flexibility and add more realism to your terrains. Heightfield Terrains are also significantly faster to render!

Heighfield terrains are manually sculptable and parameters can be animated - e.g. to simulate a terrain erosion over time for instance!

And finally, you can easily set up your graph outputs to drive your material presence, directly from within the Terrain Editor interface.

The Heightfield Terrains technology comes with its set of new dedicated nodes and presets, like 9 different Erosion presets and Slope, Convexity, Blur or Terrace nodes.

New Layout Nodes also let you design a terrain's 'layout' (most prominent features) using hand-drawn elements like Splines, elements from the scene, or simple shapes (circles, rectangles, rounded rectangles).

Hybrid GPU/CPU Interactive Path TracerGPU rendering comes to VUE with the new Path Tracer renderer. This renderer naturally and automatically simulates real-life lighting, and automatically calculates many effects that have to be specifically set with other methods, such as depth of field, caustics, ambient occlusion, and indirect lighting.

Path tracing in VUE Infinite 2016 is available as an interactive rendering quality in the viewports, as well as an offline rendering engine.

Preset Variations allow you to immediately include subtle differences to your plant (change the number of buds on a blooming flower, or its petal colors for instance).

This new feature allows you to easily add variety to create realistic environments with one single plant species!

Within VUE Infinite 2016, you directly get access to the PlantFactory species presets and variations within the Plant Browser, the Plant Editor and within your EcoSystem population list.

So, at every step of your scene creation process, you are able to select the species you want, the preset you want and the variations you want!

Multiple Global EcoSystems and EcoPainter ImprovementsVUE Infinite 2016 now allows you to populate your scenes with multiple Global EcoSystems layers (i.e. not linked to any underlying material). You can save your Global EcoSystem populations as EcoPainter brushes, and re-use them at any time, in any scene!

VUE Infinite 2016 ships with 12 EcoPainter brushes to get you started. Populations in your EcoSystem brushes can also be used in any standard EcoSystem material!

VUE Infinite 2016 includes 20 EcoPainter effector brushes, including a new Rotate effector to dynamically alter the placement of your EcoSystem populations.

Memory Saving TechnologiesYou can now optimize memory consumption by using baked (static or dynamic) versions of PlantFactory species for your EcoSystem populations, or by converting any referenced assets in your scenes to EcoSystem Instances.

Customizable WorkspaceVUE Infinite 2016 lets you reorganize the layout of the interface even further to better suite your workflow:

Group/Ungroup related dialogs together to save space and customize your interface at will

Scene snapshot preview in OS browser is automatically created after the render

Compatible with HiDPI displays

Scenes and assets thumbnail previews in Windows Explorer

Requirements

Minimum System Requirements

VUE is a 64 bit application, designed for the Windows 64 bits XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10 and Intel Mac OS X platforms. Like all 3D packages, it is highly demanding in terms of computer power. Although the application is totally multi-threaded to ensure the smoothest possible response, you have to realize that there is a lot going on when you work in VUE.

Please note that using VUE on a system carrying the below specification may result in slow response time and longer render times!

Please read further on for recommended minimal specification for an optimal VUE experience.